Marco Facchin-Clerici, Ph.D.
Mental Representations
I'm skeptical about representational theories of the mind, which I criticize in most of my papers. If I'm right, our best scientific theories of the mind don't need representations at all and mental representations should simply be eliminated from our ontology.​
At present, I'm starting to investigate how can we non-representationally account for "representation hungry" cognition, and why are we so intuitively prone to believe in mental representations, given that they do not exist. I think that these two problem can be solved together elaborating a form of illusionism about mental representations.
Cognitive extensions
Is each and every cog of the cognitive machinery inside our brain? In several paper I've argued for a negative answer to this question.
Toghether with some colleagues, I've argued that the spinal cord should be conceived of as a genuine cog of our cognitive system. I've also spent some time clarifying the very idea of a cognitive extension, defending it from some objections.
​At present, I'm interested in investigating how (and whether) different cognitive extension can be used to answer the "representation-hungry" challenge - and how our use of representations outside the head can give us the impression of having representations in the head.
Marks of the mental
What are minds? Can we define them? Can we say what "tought", "cognition" and other similar terms denote? I think that we cannot. I've already argued that we cannot define "cognition" (at least, not in a satisfactory manner) - and I think the same argument can be applied to "thought", "mind" and other similar terms.​At present, however, I'm still a bit hesitant about recommending an eliminativist solution. I think we can decently capture the semantic of these terms using a state-space based approach. Basically, I'm getting converted to conceptual spaces.